Mysterious Bodies: Solving and De-Solving Disability in the Fin-de-Siècle Mystery
Mysterious Bodies: Solving and De-Solving Disability in the Fin-de-Siècle Mystery
This chapter argues that disability becomes fully specimen in the fin-de-siècle mystery, which grants authority to the professional discourses of medicine, science, and law. Comparing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893), the chapter illuminates the interplay between scientific discourse and narrative structure in fin-de-siècle mysteries, revealing the ambiguity with which late Victorians understood and criminalized disability. Despite Jekyll and Hyde’s modern Gothic, open narrative structure, the novella confirms the conservative disability stereotypes associated with late Victorian criminology and physiognomy, which placed anxieties of cultural deviance upon the disabled mind and body. In contrast, despite the conservative drive towards closure typical of detective fiction, ‘The Crooked Man’ undermines those stereotypes and the supposed criminality of the disabled body. However, when either narrative focalizes through characters with freakish bodies, that focalization troubles the professional authority of scientific discourse and denies the possibility of controlling deviance or separating it from imagined normalcy.
Keywords: modern Gothic, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sherlock Holmes, Jekyll and Hyde, open narrative, detective fiction, mystery, physiognomy, criminology
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
